“... sitting in it, she said, I would know that I was now fully immersed in the Affair. This lively old lady (she explained that she was the daughter of the officer who had been involved with Dreyfus) then moved from gentle courtesies to a most imposing formality. She realised, she said, that I spoke French, but in order that we might avoid any possible ...”

“... has another guilty secret (this time plagiarism) but also a rich and comically ogrish woman called Lady Ogram. It sometimes seems he dislikes the idea of Gissing having a bit of fun. Indeed, as I said at the outset, Mr Halperin’s judgments are often mysterious to me. Will Warburton, Gissing’s last novel, is about a young man who loses his money and becomes ...”

“... an adulterer’s use of the text ‘Love thy neighbour’ as he schemes to enter the bed of the lady next door. They ‘gravelled’ T. S. Eliot when he was composing ‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism’, yet Eliot was to impose his own philosophy on Dante, affirming the essentiality of Hell’s existence, and that true sinners go there ...”

“... outside the American Embassy in London, thus disproving (as a pamphlet of the time pointed out) Lady Bracknell’s piercing words in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in ...”

“... been allowed to put sterling into the system in October 1990 was a clear sign that the old lady was losing her political grip. It was an issue, therefore, on which Major had staked not only his economic judgment, but much emotional and political capital. Perhaps this explains why, though far from alone in endorsing ERM membership, he identified himself ...”

“... rather harsh portraits of suspiciously Oliphant-like writers in Trollope and James. If neither Lady Carbury in The Way We Live Now (1873) nor Mrs Stormer in ‘Greville Fane’ (1892) offers an exact resemblance, the combination of needy widowhood, caddishly indolent sons and relentless word-spinning – Mrs Stormer ‘could invent stories by the yard, but ...”

“... deprivation, Molly Trevelyan’s magnificent tapestry, now displayed over the chimney-piece in Lady Trevelyan’s parlour at Wallington, can stand for the rest. It commemorates the failure of her strenuous attempt between 1903 and 1910 to build up a genuine political partnership with her husband Charles, despite her years of self-education for the ...”

“... Kinnock would crack under the pressure of a long campaign. As things turned out, it was the Iron Lady herself who showed repeated signs of metal fatigue. From her initial promise to go ‘on and on’, to the bizarre press conference where she paraded her whole Cabinet jammed together side by side – in Hugo Young’s savage phrase, a row of ‘tight-assed ...”

“... by spectacles of patrician corruption (Lord Lovescombe committing adultery in the bamboo, Lady Lovescombe committing adultery in the ornamental pond) and looniness (strange relatives behind every bush). And having herself ‘only half-left childhood’, she intuitively recognises in her hosts ‘the permanent childhood of adults decked out in the ...”

“... testimony. George Bernard Shaw announced that ‘as Edith was an audaciously unconventional lady and Hubert an exceedingly unfaithful husband he does not see how a presentable biography is possible as yet; and he has nothing to contribute to a mere whitewashing operation.’ The Shavian reluctance was overcome, and Doris Langley Moore’s biography did ...”

“... that Medievals must have learned either to keep very quiet in bed or else to turn deaf ears: the lady of Montaillou confessed that she was raped in her own bedroom (she seems not to have cried out), and that on another occasion her own majordomo slipped optimistically into bed with her, though there were servants in other beds in the same room. One final ...”

“... his dealings with his Pythia. On formal occasions, sometimes with irony, he addresses her as Young Lady; more privately he uses her original name, Arieka. These distinctions are important; Ionides is her savvy instructor but also, when she is in formal or prophetic mode, her servant. What is about to happen is a confrontation, not at all unusual in this ...”

“... its product.’ More tellingly still, evoking her childhood fear of sharing the fate of the crazy lady next door, who died with her clothes off and her furniture all upside down, she writes: ‘On emotional tiptoe, daring as I could, dodging as I had to, I approached a first vagrant notion of rape; also, more soundly, an intuition of the fiercer ...”

“... character. There is a marvellous mixing of respectability and libido. She is the perfect suburban lady honeycombed with dark subterranean desires. She loves to remember the sparkling, bourgeois social life and travel opportunities afforded to the wife of a tycoon (‘people tell me that my dining room was rather like one of those celebrated Parisian ...”

“... but he also possesses a remarkable capacity for shooting himself in the foot. And in marrying Lady Diana Spencer, he thought he had chosen the ideal bride, yet it turned out that he had made the most terrible mistake of his life. The most important thing that a Prince of Wales has to do is to choose the right wife. Neither George IV nor Edward VIII ...”